Filed under: Enterprise, Software, Xserve, Leopard
Will Leopard allow virtualization of OS X Server?
Big-iron system admins with a Mac streak (there's more of them than you'd think) would dearly love to see a fully virtualizable version of Mac OS X Server, one that could be slotted into a VMware infrastructure on third-party hardware, and run alongside other server OSes like Windows Server, Linux and Solaris, sharing hardware resources and reducing administrative costs. Shame that it won't happen: Apple's licensing doesn't permit running 10.x Server on anything other than Apple gear. There is some change in the air, though, as a careful reading of the new license agreement for Server 10.5 reveals -- virtualization of OS X Server on OS X Server may be coming sooner rather than later.A post on the Macenterprise mailing list and an article at TidBITS take note of this licensing change, which now would seem to explicitly permit the use of multiple instances of Mac OS X Server on a single Apple machine. With this green light, applications like the in-early-beta Parallels Server and the unannounced but surely-in-progress VMware equivalent could provide multiple instances of OS X Server along with Linux or Windows VMs, all on the same box. Depending on how your network services are set up, this could be a big help in selling X Server into your organization.
We'll keep an eye on both Parallels and VMware for future announcements in server virtualization. Exciting times!
via Adam Engst/twitter. Thanks to everyone else who sent this in.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
tim said 1:26PM on 10-31-2007
we'd love to switch to xserves at netriver, but without this and iscsi, it just wont do enough for what we need.
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Jason said 2:51PM on 10-31-2007
I haven't read the whole Leopard Server License, but looking at the highlighted text in the TidBITS article, I think this is much ado about nothing. The only change they've highlighted is the addition of the second sentence, but there's nothing in the first sentence that would preclude one from installing multiple copies of Tiger server, either virtualized or in a multi-boot setup, so long as (1) you are installing on an "Apple-labeled computer" and (2) you own multiple copies of the server software. While the new language makes it more explicit that virtualization/multi-boot is allowed, the old language doesn't prohibit it.
Again, this is based solely on the highlighted language - I haven't read the rest of the license agreement, as I do not have a copy of OS X server.
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Rboyett said 4:25PM on 10-31-2007
If Apple gives me the ability to run VMware ESX and multiple OSX instances, I guarantee I'll sell a ton of their servers. I've had two instances where I could have convinced a couple of medium sized businesses to go to OSX but they wanted to virtualize their DC during their migration. Both companies were lamenting how much they hated using MS products. One went with a virtualized linux solution. The other sighed and went with windows 2003 R2.
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quandmeme said 7:07PM on 10-31-2007
Okay, now where's the translation? I skimmed the slashdot discussion of this, but just like here, there was no sentence that says, so that networks can . . .
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